How can a meticulously argued philosophy of law, politics, and society yield such an array of conclusions in the hands of its contemporary followers? The writings of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1842) attracted many followers, the most notable being James Mill (1773–1836), his son John Stuart Mill (1806–73), and, through the latter, a whole coterie of reform journalists and intellectuals. While the argument continues today whether John Stuart Mill remained a utilitarian in his mature writings, it is clear that for one such professed follower, William Thompson (1775–1832), the bark of Benthamism blew into a land of decentralized autarkic socialist cooperatives within which perfect equality reigned. In Bentham's vision, the pursuit of the greatest happiness for the greatest number required the end of private property, capitalism, and male dominance. For Mark Kaswan, Bentham is “one of the great theorists of liberal capitalism [and] Thompson one of the founders of socialism” (p. ix).
Although the more analytic political philosophers among us might reject these deviations as simply muddled reasoning, it pays to reflect on the fact that Bentham’s reform ideas had a powerful real-world effect in the creation of the modern bureaucratic British welfare state, beginning with the creation of a meritocratic civil service in India (first documented by Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians in India, 1959). Today, following the lead of Michael Foucault (Discipline and Punish, 1977), Bentham’s “Panopticon” and workhouse plans have become a byword for the padded iron cages of late capitalist modernity. And who can ignore the utilitarian patrimony of the science of “cost—benefit analysis,” whether as a friend or foe?
The first part of the book under review explores the concept of happiness, beginning by distinguishing its two faces, hedonic and eudaemonic. The former is grounded in “kinetic” pleasures and the fulfillment of one desire after another—or better, the avoidance of one pain after another. The latter, grounded in “katastematic” pleasure, is an enduring condition signified by an absence of fear. Kinetic pleasures are always “in the moment” and can be measured, quantified, aggregated, and compared. Katastematic pleasures are freed from the grip of endless fears and desires because they are grounded in both objective institutions that mitigate bodily fears and in a subjective condition of freedom from the grip of the desires they prompt. Today, Bentham’s “subjective-hedonic-individualist” happiness and Aristotle’s “objective-eudaemonic-relational” happiness have been translated into two literatures, that of subjective well-being (SWB) and objective well-being (OWB).
The chapters that follow, on Bentham’s and Thompson’s theories of happiness, track these distinctions. Kaswan’s most important conclusion regarding Bentham is that “there was never any need to convince anyone to do anything that would bring them pleasure—they could be expected to seek it on their own—but because happiness has greater requirements, it was sometimes necessary to show how one pleasure might be more conducive to happiness than another, even if its effects might be less immediate” (p. 37). And, depending on the circumstances, this “showing” can be enacted through public opinion (what J. S. Mill called “moral coercion”) or legal coercion. Of Bentham’s four components of utility (security, subsistence, abundance, and equality), security of expectations is primary because without it, we have no assurance that our actions will yield the intended consequences. As in Hobbes, Locke, and Smith, coercive enforcement of property rights and contractual exchange is the foundation of all other goods that follow in its train.
For Kaswan, while Thompson “retains much of Bentham’s conceptual framework,” his focus is on social happiness resulting from “the structuring of relationships by social institutions” (pp. 55–56). In short, Thompson sought to combine Bentham with Robert Owen, using Owen’s theory of the social determinates of character formation to achieve Bentham’s ideal of happiness maximization. With Thompson making this move, Kaswan believes that Bentham’s bourgeois individualism is unmasked: together, they are read as precursors of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of capitalist hegemony. Subjective happiness as mere experience of discrete pleasures gives way to an objective and continuous sense of well-being. Thompson lists four components of pleasure that are essential for happiness: “the preservation of health,” “individual independence” as the provision of one’s own physical space, “social and intellectual enjoyment and self-improvement,” and “economy of labor” as shortening its time and intensity and combining it with more pleasurable accompaniments (p. 69). These ends share many features of contemporary discussions of objective well-being and Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach for measuring social happiness. Kaswan thus stresses Thompson’s belief that institutions should not be evaluated “based on how well they perform the role they are meant to play” but, rather, on “the principles on which the institutions are based and how well they adhere to those principles.” The questions of need fulfillment and the development of capacities become practical and political questions regarding the structuring of the institutions “through which we fulfill our needs and exercise our abilities” (p. 91).
The second part of the book addresses Thompson’s “politics of happiness.” While Bentham’s “greatest happiness” is a sum of individual happiness, Thompson’s is always a political question regarding “the structure of the social institutions within which people act” (p. 96). Bentham’s happiness rests on security of (individual) expectations, premised on private property and contractual enforcement producing subsistence and abundance—and, with luck and over time, increasing material equality. Governments are required only to provide security by enforcing property and contractual rights. Thompson held that enforcing Bentham’s “security” guaranteed poverty and inequality. His answer was political democracy and common property. Kasawn reads Thompson’s theories as prescient anticipations of the critiques of political economy by Marx and Engels. And it is here—more than halfway through the book—that the author addresses Thompson’s cooperative answer.
Only one of Thompson’s writings specifically outlines his cooperative ideal. Each community, of between 500 and 2,000 members, would be autarkic, both in production and consumption. He saw little need for outside market relationships because cooperation would result in enough for all and no incentive to produce more for outside sale. On this rather sketchy foundation, Kaswan then constructs two contrasting theories of political democracy. For Bentham (and James Mill), representative democracy is only a check against misrule; for Thompson, political democracy is a shared way of life—a social practice that pervades all relationships. Thompson’s cooperatives, by abolishing any distinction between public and private, screen out “politics” altogether: public opinion replaces legal coercion, while “governance becomes little more than a way of solving coordination problems” (p. 155).
The least satisfactory part of Happiness, Democracy, and the Cooperative Movement concludes by exploring Thompson’s principles put into practice, first by looking at early (and short-lived) cooperative societies such as the Rochdale Pioneers and various Owenite initiatives. Kaswan’s examples of long-lived contemporary cooperative societies are bitterly ironic: Sunkist (oranges), Ocean Spray (cranberries), and Land o’ Lakes (dairy)—mega–consumer advertisers and distributors of the produce of large-scale (but family-owned) industrial farms. That said, Kaswan’s study of Thompson reminds us that supposedly fixed concepts in political theory can become metaphors that creatively migrate and mutate from mind to mind. Those like Bentham, and Hobbes before him, fought losing battles with their readers who have minds of their own.
